A warning to dumb, ugly men everywhere

That’s not the most gracious of post titles, but I might as well try my hand at clickbait. Since I last spent a significant amount of time blogging — and it’s been a solid five years or more — all of the cool bloggers, along with the far greater number of riotously expendable ones, have found new ways to attract site traffic. Obnoxious or contentious post titles have always been a part of the scheme, but now that there are far more blogpiles to choose from, a lot of people have upped the clickbait ante.

None of which is to say that this post isn’t about dumb, ugly men, as it assuredly is. More than that, though, it’s about irony. The sort of giddy, high-caliber irony that arises when people have no capacity whatsoever to keep themselves in check though self-appraisal. Irony in onion-like layers, complete with the potential for tears.

It comes this time in the form of a post by one of the various self-deluded hominids in New Hampshire who contribute to the pile of ignorant tripe called Granite Grok I have mentioned here numerous times lately. At first I wrote about G.G. because one of the especially illiterate contributors there was, and may still be, obsessed with me, but now because it’s almost impossible to believe that any one finite group of Internet warriors can churn out an amount of verbal slag with a reverse correlation to reality that is nearly infinite. More simply, they couldn’t lie more prolifically and prodigiously if they tried — and they sometimes do, but far more often they actually believe in what they say, which is a lot funnier.

First, Scott Morales repeatedly refers to the short-in-stature Robert Reich, whose video “How to Fix the Supreme Court” is the basis for Scott’s post and who probably does not wake up troubled by the idea that the abject fuckheads of America are going to poke holes in his arguments, as a dwarf. In fact, he says it so many times that a clear-headed reader starts to wonder, “Wow — might this fellow be substituting insults for a reasoned argument? Isn’t there a word for that in formal logic?” The answers are yes and yes — Scott is shamelessly committing a textbook ad hominem fallacy here. It’s not that name-calling takes an otherwise sound argument off the table, of course, although it’s bound to reduce the opposition’s willingness to entertain it; it’s that when you try to fully replace the latter with the former, people brighter than you tend to notice.

But wait, of course there’s more! Not content to commit logical fallacies, Scott has to demonstrate that he also misunderstands them. Here, he tries to assert that Reich is attacking two strawmen with his arguments, those strawmen supposedly being:

1. Republicans raging about how Obama should not nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia are basing this on a clause in the Constitution that bars any President from appointing a new justice in his final year in office.

2. Republicans have asserted that the Senate Majority Leader has the right to delay and obstruct the rest of the Senate from voting on a President’s nominee.

Reich clearly makes no such claims. Yes, he points out that the Constitution certainly doesn’t bar the President from, well, being the President at any time during his or her term, and he also notes that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been acting like an obstructionist asshole. But Reich clearly isn’t proposing that Republicans are pretending that they have legal grounds for behaving as they have; indeed, he is merely pointing out that they don’t. The GOP leadership lacks sound reasons for rallying against Obama’s power to appoint someone to fill the vacant seat, and Reich is saying that as a result, McConnell et al. are, in essence, relying on unsound ones.

I am confident that even if Scott Morales had the mental wattage to understand this, he wouldn’t admit it.

Scott finishes his post with a faux-triumphant “done.” One can only hope, right?

But that’s still not the end of the collective G.G. quest to dig well beneath the floor of the basement or bad reasoning. In the comments, a smattering of people cheer Scott on, including a woman whose avatar suggests that she just finished a ketamine binge by riding the Tilt-a-Whirl for about seven hours straight. (I admit that I was charmed by the image of her 6′ 3″ husband courageously fighting off the advances of a 4′ 8″ suitor; the fact that it’s unlikely either man exists is immaterial.) Ed Naile’s cruelly repugnant visage you’ve already seen, along with that of the guy in charge of this entire electronic shitshow.

Seriously. It’s uncool to pick on people’s appearance unless they invite it explicitly. KIm Kardashian and countless imitators waggle their naked asses in front of cell-phone camera lenses and not only deserve everything they receive in return, but expect it. But when you malign the appearance of a political commentator and aren’t about to win any beauty pageants yourself, well, dudes…yeah. Glass mantions and big-ass cinderblocks, etc.

I’m sure they and the rest of Idiot America will get right on fixing that busted hypocrisy filter.

Doc Bushwell is busy with other activities but continues to lend a moniker to this backwater of a blog. Jim is an engineering professor with a fondness for running shoes and drumsticks; and Kevin Beck is a self-exiled member of the clan who refuses to stay gone.